How good are Core Duo's?

I need a laptop with a 17" screen and 1024 of Memory and I found this one...

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=337639&pfp=BROWSE

But I don't know how good that processor is compared to the normal Pentium 4's though the normal P4 laptops are now hard to find these days, all I kept getting was refurbised hits. All I need is to be able to work Adobe Photoshop CS2 on it and well that proggy is pretty intense on a laptop. My friend runs it on a Toshiba P4 3.2 ghz and well that toshiba on that link is a core duo centrino T2300. Any thoughts or comments on that choice.

dja2k

They're very powerful. Many things my laptop (see sig) can do as fast or faster than my desktop @ 2.9GHz. Definetly A LOT better than normal P4's. Far better than my old Athlon64 laptop. Pretty compareable to Dothans for single threaded applications, but given the dual core aspect, it blows it out of the water at the end of the day. My T2600 with 2GB of memory does very well in Adobe CS2.

The Core Duos are great chips powerful enough and energy economical. When I'm at school doing work on my laptop I laugh at the other ppl that are using A64's and old p4 laptops because I can run mine most of the day w/out a recharge and every hour or so they are searching for open plugin's to charge theirs up.

lol, yeah you can say that again. I might as well carry a generator with my lappy!